Kinflicks

by Lisa Alther

  The next time I saw Ira he was a distant duck-shooting silhouette.

  Earlier that week Atheliah had been slogging around in hip boots in the marsh on the far side of the pond looking for holes in the barbed-wire fence. We had half a dozen heifers by this time, and they kept getting out. They’d appear, milling around in dazed bovine confusion, on the road to town. We’d have to drive down and herd them home.

  Atheliah, as reliable and relentless as a St. Bernard in an avalanche, tracked down and repaired the holes. But at the same time, she discovered a sagging gray duck blind. We’d never seen it before because it was largely camouflaged by the gray skeletons of drowned trees. Even after Atheliah pointed it out from the cabin, we could just barely pick it out when the light was right. Other times it blended right into the graveyard of standing tree trunks.

  ‘Just left over from other years,’ Eddie informed us confidently. ‘No one would dare to use it now that we’re here.’ Eddie’s method of expression — her deep voice and authoritative inflections, the way she stood with her legs planted like the pilings of a pier and with her arms folded serenely across her chest — gave her opinions the force of decrees. That was why I was so startled to be awakened at dawn on the opening day of duck season by rifle blasts.

  I lay still trying to remember where I was. Gunshots weren’t an unfamiliar sound to me. The Cloyds were forever killing something or other. Each Cloyd had his favorite rifle, and gun racks hung in their house with the frequency of crucifixes in a Catholic church. They were always dragging in bloodied carcasses as special treats for our family. Mother had tried to instill in me forbearance of the folkway: ‘Country people are just like that.’ And she had exclaimed over the gory corpses like a mother over a small child’s first finger painting. Somehow she usually managed to render them edible as well. Remembering Mother and her compulsive kindness sent pangs of remorse through me: I hadn’t written or phoned in almost a year; I had thrown her letters unread into the trash in Cambridge; I had departed without leaving a forwarding address, so that her current letters were being returned stamped ‘Addressee Unknown.’ She deserved better.

  Having finally recognized the rough log wall as belonging to our Vermont cabin, I dragged myself out of bed and across the cold plank floor to the window. There were more shots, and a flock of ducks lifted off the pond in a flurry of feathers. A couple fell lifeless into the water. By straining my eyes in the gray dawn, I could barely pick out two human figures (one of them Ira, as it turned out) peering over the edge of the blind.

  Then I saw Eddie marching down the meadow, her braid flicking and lashing behind her like the tail of an enraged lion. Atheliah, Mona and Laverne, dressed identically in lumberjack shirts and fatigues and boots, trailed in Eddie’s outraged wake like dinghies behind an ocean liner.

  Atheliah, of course, could never be said to ‘trail’ anywhere. She barreled along like a diesel truck on a downgrade, carrying her ax. Laverne came next, stalking lithely through the timothy. If Laverne had fallen from the roof yesterday when she and Atheliah had been up there caulking, she would have managed to twist around in mid-air and land lightly on all fours. Whereas Atheliah would have crashed to the ground and left a crater like a giant meteorite. Atheliah was round-shouldered from years of playing down what she considered merely two absurd mounds of woefully misplaced flesh. But Laverne led with her chest at all times.

  Bringing up the rear was Mona. If Laverne exuded an aura of invitation, Mona exuded one of confrontation. Behind her purple-tinted goggle lenses, her wide eyes periodically became squinty and sinister. She looked like the Gestapo interrogator in spy movies who had lines like, ‘Ve haff ways off makingk you talk.’

  Eddie halted abruptly at the pond edge, the others almost colliding with her. She nodded at the dark green rowboat. Atheliah turned it upright with a flick of her wrist and pushed it into the water with her foot. Eddie climbed in, her weight immediately grounding it. The other three finally freed it by pushing in unison and tripping and splashing in the cold slimy water. Then they hopped in too.

  Atheliah rowed them through the open water toward the blind, the oars moving in great swooping strokes like the wings of a giant bird. The heads in the blind stared as the boat slipped through the dead gray trees like a skier down a slalom course. Eddie, in a grand gesture, stood on the front seat and placed a rubber-booted foot on the prow, like Washington crossing the Delaware. The little rowboat, sunk already to its gunwales, listed dangerously. I gritted my teeth. Just in time, they arrived at the blind, and Eddie grabbed hold and righted the tilting craft.

  She yelled up in her most authoritative voice. The heads yelled back. Atheliah reached over and shook the post nearest her like a puppy shaking a rag in its teeth. The blind trembled and swayed as though it were made of weathered toothpicks. The heads yelled down at her. Eddie turned around and said something to Atheliah; Atheliah lowered an oar, blade first, into the water. Then, holding onto the blind, she climbed into the knee-deep water, leading with one hip-booted leg. Mona handed her the ax. Reverently, Atheliah removed its leather case. Then, taking the handle in both hands, she raised it above her head. The honed blade flashed red in the rising sun. With one powerful swing, she buried it in the post. The little boat quaked and pitched in the tidal wave produced by the lurching of the blind. Atheliah pulled the ax loose and, just as she was poised for another stroke, the two men scrambled down with their rifles into their inflatable canvas boat. They rowed quickly to shore and disappeared into the woods, carrying the boat.

  Atheliah’s second stroke severed the leg, and the blind listed sharply. She chopped through two of the remaining legs, until the last one snapped of its own accord. The entire structure toppled into the pond with a splash.

  Later that day Eddie had us all out stepping off the borders of our property and planting every fifty feet shiny silver signs that read ‘No hunting, trapping, fishing or snowmobiling.’ Laverne paced off the sections and tied pieces of yarn to twigs to mark the spot for each post. Eddie and I were nailing signs onto the posts. Mona, in a flurry of chips, was shaping branches into posts. Atheliah, rising to her full six feet with the post maul outstretched over her head, drove the posts with resounding thuds.

  During a rest period, I said to Eddie with tentative disapproval, ‘After all, this has been their hunting ground for generations. And besides, I thought you didn’t like the idea of private ownership. I thought you believed that the wealth should be shared?’

  Eddie, startled to be questioned, replied, ‘Communal ownership only works if the people involved are highly evolved types. Most Stark’s Boggers need rehabilitation before they’d be suited for it. In the meantime, they need guidelines to restrain their savagery. It’s not their fault, however: They’ve been raised in a corrupt, death-dealing society. How could they turn out any other way?’

  ‘“Highly evolved” ? Does that mean anyone who happens to agree with you?’ I asked, amazed at my daring. As usual, my loyalties were torn. I had spent too much time with Clem to feel free to pass judgment with confidence about the level of evolution attained by the different social groups.

  Eddie glared at me.’ “Highly evolved” : attuned to The Revolution. This macho shit — stalking and killing and terrorizing — is about as low as you can go, evolutionarily.’

  By the end of the day, we had placed eighty-three signs around the hills that formed the circumference of our property. We returned to the cabin and were standing with our backs to the stove in our mud-caked boots with our callused, chapped hands behind our backs. Eddie said, ‘Well, that’s that!’

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t that. The following week Eddie and I were in the woods checking on the heifers. The colorful fall leaf display had withered and fallen, and crunched under our boots. We had found the six black and white heifers, but Minnie, the milk cow, was missing. Minnie had dried up, leaving us milkless. I had forgotten that we had to have her bred, and let her have a calf, in order to continue to get milk. The
Planned Parenthood literature had not reviewed this aspect of female sexuality. We searched the woods for her. Normally she would come to find us if she heard us. But this time she didn’t appear.

  I was peering nervously into a cave that looked as though it might house bears when I heard Eddie exclaim, ‘Oh Christ!’

  I ran over and saw with horror the target of her blasphemy: A bloodied brown cowhide hung wrapped like a robe around one of our No Trespassing posts. Rammed down on top of the post was Minnie’s head, eyes closed. Beside the post on the carpet of vivid leaves were strewn severed cow legs and ropelike guts and globs of white quivering fat.

  ‘The bastards butchered Minnie!’ Eddie screamed. I felt distinctly sick and turned away from the gory mess. As I did so, I discovered tire tracks from two trail bikes in a patch of loam.

  Gingerly folding Minnie’s hide and carrying it between us, we walked back to the cabin, stunned.

  Buck season opened the next week. We were eating our dessert of soy date bars by the window that overlooked the pond. The sun had set behind the hill. It was twilight. As we watched, a buck and two does leapt out from the woods, paused and listened and sniffed, and then walked grandly to the pond edge. As they reached out their heads to drink, a rifle fired. The handsome buck shook his magnificent antlers ferociously a couple of times. As his head drooped, the two does looked around frantically. They sprang away from the pond, then stopped and looked back quizzically at the buck, who had sunk to his knees in the shallow water. As the does bounded into the woods, the buck collapsed on his side.

  We five sat with our dessert suspended midway to our mouths. When we realized what had happened, we leapt up and raced for the door. Once outside, Eddie screamed in the general direction of the woods, ‘Goddam fucking murderers!’

  We stumbled through the tangled timothy. By the time we reached the shore, the water on which the large tan buck floated was murky with blood. The buck wasn’t dead. When he heard us, he gave a snort and a few weak token tosses of his headpiece — which had nine points on it, a huntsman’s trophy indeed. This gesture of protest apparently drained him of his last reserves of strength. As we watched, his eyes clouded over; he twitched, sending out ripples, and then he lay still.

  ‘Damn you!’ we screamed to the darkening woods, tears gushing.

  We each grabbed a leg, and with much grunting and straining, managed to drag the carcass out of the water and onto a patch of timothy. We studied the neat hole in the buck’s muscled white chest. That accomplished, we didn’t know what else to do. It seemed a waste to bury all that protein; on the other hand, we couldn’t have eaten it, and we were damned if we’d let the trespassing hunters have it.

  By now the sky was black. The only light anywhere around was the weak glow of a lamp in our kitchen at the top of the meadow. Eventually we left the buck where he was. The next morning he was gone.

  The snows began, and late one blustery night we were awakened by a deafening roar from outside. Eddie and I lay still under the army surplus sleeping bag we used as a quilt, listening in terror as the roar circled and recircled our cabin. Finally we got up and walked fearfully to the window. Looking out through the mis-stitches in my crocheted rainbow curtains, we witnessed half a dozen snow machines shooting past, their headlights sweeping eerily across the new snow on the meadow.

  Relieved and enraged, Eddie stomped out of the bedroom and over to the door. Atheliah was already standing there in rubber boots, her flannel nightgown hanging out from under her olive air force parka. She was holding her ax and was placidly flicking her callused thumb on the blade. Laverne and Mona were nowhere in sight. Eddie and I put on our boots and parkas over our sweat suits, and the three of us marched onto the porch.

  The six snow machines swept past us and continued their circuit around the cabin like marauding Indians around a wagon train, enveloping us in clouds of exhaust. At the controls of each machine knelt a figure of indeterminate sex, encased in a quilted body suit and felted rubber boots and a huge crash helmet with a visor like on a knight’s helmet. I was certain that I detected Ira’s flaring nostrils behind one of the visors, and the fat face of his friend Rodney behind another.

  Eddie yelled in a great booming voice that was inaudible in the roaring of the engines, ‘Get the hell out of here, or I’ll call the cops!’

  There were no cops in Stark’s Bog, but the expression on her face seemed to make up for what her message lacked in content — because, after one more spin around the cabin, the machines broke away one by one and filed down the meadow toward the pond. In the meadow, they paused long enough to weave some intricate crisscrossing patterns through the snow, their headlights sweeping crazily across the field. And then they disappeared over the hill toward town.

  The next morning Eddie marched us out to the meadow. We scraped a patch of ground clear of its shallow snow. The ground hadn’t yet frozen, and so we were able to dig a deep hole, working in shifts with two shovels. By the end of the afternoon, the hole was the size of a hefty grave, five feet deep and maybe six feet in diameter. Eddie disappeared into the barn and returned with a dozen stakes with sharp points that looked like the poles the Cloyds used for curing tobacco. When I finally got the picture of what we were doing — setting a trap based on Vietcong guerrilla techniques — I balked.

  ‘Wait a minute, Eddie. We just want to scare them, not kill them.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ Eddie asked, looking around for support.

  Laverne shrugged.

  Mona said gleefully, ‘I’d just as soon hurt them while we’re at it.’

  Atheliah nodded soberly in agreement.

  ‘I don’t want any part of it,’ I announced, turning around and heading for the cabin. My stand wasn’t entirely disinterested. I suspected that Ira and his friend Rodney had been among the snowmobilers. Although I hated their macho guts, I didn’t want to see them spilled all across our meadow either. The old spike-in-the-pit routine required that your victim be a faceless abstraction. Alas, Ira and Rodney were becoming real people to me.

  I peeked out the window through my rainbow curtains as the others sunk the sharp stakes in the pit. Then they laid fir branches across its mouth and piled snow on the branches. When they had finished packing the snow, the location of the pit was still evident to someone who knew of its existence. But at night, and to the unsuspecting, it would be invisible.

  Later that week after a heavy snow the snowmobiles returned in the middle of the night. Once again we were wrenched from sleep by their roaring. The five of us jumped from our beds and flocked to the window overlooking the meadow. As before, after a couple of dozen circuits of our cabin, the snowmobilers broke away one by one and swept down the meadow. The first three machines were nowhere near the pit. Each time one reached the bottom without mishap, the others groaned with disappointment.

  But the driver of the fourth machine was a showoff. He zigzagged down the top part of the meadow, wagging the tail of his machine like a wedeln skier. His fall line passed directly over the pit, but whether or not his swooping antics would cause him to miss it was uncertain. I held my breath, suppressing an inclination to rush out and stop him. He fishtailed whimsically along, kneeling on his seat and leaning back and forth with the careening machine, as Clem used to do with his Harley.

  Just when I was sure that he had passed the pit, the ground fell out from under him and his machine was swallowed up. Eddie whooped with delight. The driver himself sailed clear of the machine. He lay half buried in the snow, dazed. Flames suddenly flared out from the pit.

  Mona said uneasily, ‘Jesus.’

  We all watched in terrified awe as flames roared and melted the snow on all sides. The driver was rolling fast down the hill.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked Eddie, our field marshal, as I trembled with fear.

  ‘We go out and “help,” — Eddie said with an insane giggle.

  Throwing on parkas and ski boots, we trooped from the cabin and strapped on our cross-country skis. We glid
ed down the meadow along the packed snowmobile tracks. By now, the fire had burned down. The other snowmobiles were flocked close by, and their drivers were standing looking into the fading inferno and shaking their helmeted heads. The fire had fortunately burned away all traces of our stakes and fir branches. Only the blackened gutted carcass of a Sno Cat remained.

  ‘Goodness me, what happened?’ Eddie inquired.

  ‘I dunno,’ one driver mumbled. ‘Jesum Crow, didn’t see the goldurn hole.’

  ‘Can we help?’ Mona asked.

  ‘Don’t suppose none of us can now,’ another driver replied dourly.

  The driver of the burnt-out machine was still lying in the snow down the hill. A couple of his friends were with him. Eddie and I strolled over.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked gravely.

  The unhappy victim had his helmet off. It was Rodney, his round mean face shaken. Squatting next to him was Ira, his visor raised to display his ruddy high-boned cheeks and his quivering nostrils. He and I smiled slightly in recognition.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Rodney snarled, ‘but you’re gonna have to pay for my machine.’

  I immediately assumed that we had been found out,

  Eddie, however, gasped with feigned outrage. ‘Why, we wouldn’t think of it!’

  ‘You had no goldurn warning signs up, so you’ll have to replace my machine!’

  ‘That beats anything I’ve ever heard! You trespass on our posted property. You harass us in the middle of the night in our private home by circling around on those — lawn mowers. And now you ask us to buy you another one when you’re dumb enough to fall in a hole!’

  ‘Jesum Crow, lady!’ Rodney yelled. ‘We’ve driven our machines on this field and this pond for years! It’s the best racetrack in the county. You can’t post it just like that!’

  ‘The hell we can’t!’ Eddie turned around on her skis. Ira and I looked at each other and shrugged. Eddie and I began herringboning back up the meadow, hunched over and pushing with our poles and looking altogether like arthritic flamingos.